New possibilities for slowing or even reversing the ageing process have been raised by a study, published in the journal Cell this week, which seems to show that genetics rather than tissue damage is the reason animals grow old.

    Conventionally, scientists have argued that ageing is the inevitable consequence of wear and tear on cells and tissues over time: toxins, ionising radiation, disease and stress all play a part in contributing to decline and death. 

    Now a team under Stuart Kim at Stanford University, working on minute nematode worms, has found that hundreds of genes implicated in the ageing process are turned on by a biological switch called elt-3, which becomes more abundant as the animal grows older.

    The scientists tried to age the worms artificially by subjecting them to stresses such as heat and radiation but none of these had any effect on the ageing genes. Prof Kim concluded that the higher level of elt-3 in older animals is the result of control mechanisms gone wrong, something he calls “developmental drift”. 

    If ageing is not the result of chemical catastrophe but driven by changes in regulatory genes, it could, in theory at any rate, be slowed down or stopped. Prof Kim cannot yet say whether developmental drift occurs in humans. 

    《細胞》雜志(Cell)上周刊登的一項研究提出了減緩甚至扭轉衰老過程的新可能性。該研究顯示，動物變老是由遺傳學原因而非組織受損造成的。

    科學家們傳統上認為，老化是細胞和組織長期磨損和破裂的必然結果：毒素、電離輻射、疾病和壓力都會促使動物衰老和死亡。

    現在，由斯坦福大學(Stanford University)的斯圖爾特•金(Stuart Kim)帶領的一個小組，正在對微小的線蟲展開研究。他們發現，一種被稱為ELT-3的生物學開關能夠啟動數百個涉及老化過程的基因，而當線蟲變老時，ELT-3變得更加豐富。

    科學家們嘗試人為使這些線蟲變老。他們讓線蟲受到熱和輻射等壓力，但是這些都不能對涉及老化過程的基因產生影響。金因此得出結論：越老的動物，其ELT-3的豐富度越高，而這是控制機制出錯的結果。他稱這種現象為 “發育漂變”(Developmental Drift)。

    如果老化不是化學過程造成的災難結果，而是由于控制它的基因發生了改變，那么從理論上說，在任何水平上，老化速度都可以被減緩甚至停止。但是金還不能確定，發育漂變是否也出現在人類身上。